25.9.11

Prime number chemistry

It's Forskningsdagene, or Research Days, in Norway. Many big cities
have special events to celebrate science research. In Trondheim there
are series of shows and lectures and the Research "Torg"
(market/square/court?) Every year, the math center participates in the
torg, and for the past few years I've been in charge of planning and
coordinating the event with the university's math department.

The
theme for this year was chemistry, so we decided to 'number chemistry'.
I've always thought of the integers like molecules, with prime numbers
as the atoms. We set up number molecule decorations, a prime number
target game, and computers where visitors could find the prime
factorizations of their phone numbers.

Students for the
math department made the decorations and the ball toss game and did a
very nice job. I wrote the program to find the factorizations, and we
all made a variety of signs talking about primes, twin primes, the GIMPS
project, and some prime number periodic tables that are pretty cool.

The
game was a big success. Kids waiting in line were given a card with a
number on it, maybe 18 or 54 or 770. The would need to figure out the
prime factors by the time they got to the front. They would then throw
balls at targets painted with primes, the goal being to knock down
primes whose product matched the target number. Winners wrote their
names on a sticky note and stuck it on the wall, enough of reward to
make players proud without having to hand out candy.

Here's my periodic table of prime numbers, made to match the chemistry theme of the day and drive home the idea of "primes as atoms". Twin primes are colored gray, with symbols added for Mersenne primes, Sophie Germaine primes, Fermat primes, and palindrome primes. I think it came out nice!

I went through many iterations of the table. I harbored an unfounded hope that maybe by organizing the integers in a different form maybe some kind of cool pattern would pop out. Here's the periodic table shape with integers starting at 1 and all of the prime numbers colored blue. It turns out that even in the periodic table format, the primes appear to be patternless. I don't know whether to be happy or sad.

2 comments:

if you go to my facebook page : " ben shafai " i have posted an article titled : " periodic prime table " in which the primes are arranged in the first column to the left and the non-primes take their places row by row to the right of primes which is a type of sieve of eratosthenes in reverse. now what i have noticed is a peculiar pattern among the non-primes which raises the question why a seemingly random set of primes generates this kind of pattern among the non-primes. i have also posted another article on physics titled : " spacetime " if anyone's interested.

Check out atomic no.& atomic diameter changes or melting points or activation energies and note either prime / even no. / prime pattern with 70% correlation or prime x prime / even no. / prime with 100% correlation. Note the even no.s between break to 2s & 3s. Chances of this not meaning something seem to be zero